Hi all, 1. Observation
There are those who wonder why so vociferous if not obstreperous attacks on free software and particularly Linux occur, and who postulate that perhaps the people doing the attacking are paid to do so. 2. Observation In these modern times, with capitalist globalization in full swing and many jobs being "shipped" from rich countries to poorer countries to yet-poorer countries, there is no reason to believe that any job that can be shipped overseas won't be, if the new site offers an adequate labor pool, or if any negative consequences of offshoring will not appear in the short term. Capitalists are always trying to reduce labor costs and doing so benefits individual executives who promote the idea. 3. "Assertion A" If a company is paying X number of dollars to market their products, and to denegrate competing products, it is only logical that their attention would be drawn to Usenet because Usenet reaches a segment of the public and there is no cost involved in transmitting a message to recipients. 4. Inference If Assertion A holds, and if capitalists wish to minimize labor costs, then a thoughtful executive will want to act upon Usenet by hiring Third World workers to perform marketing or other work on Usenet, so long as they can type sufficient English and represent themselves as knowing enough so as to make a difference. Which is to say, of course people (probably Indians, Eastern-Europeans etc) are being paid to post to Usenet. 5. Observation In many an American political Usenet group, one can observe people who perform attacks on "liberal" (American leftwing) ideas and people, which often are nonsensical, incoherent, incorrect English, without termination, often without apparent point except "attack for the sake of attack". 6. Inference Given the screwdness of the current US rightwing regime and their willingness to sink to any new low, and if Assertion A holds (political ideas being the 'product'), then it is reasonable to say that rightwing American political leaders will want to offshore any attack-dog work on Usenet to the cheapest English-capable providers, which would be in any Third World country where there are English-capable workers. 7. "Assertion B" Whereas the term FUD (fear uncertainty doubt) describes a novel but non-attacking marketing technique, what I am describing is something which is novel for a different reason: it is the marshalling of cheap foreign labor in the pursuit of not so much marketing, by "psy-ops" (psychological operations) since ultimately the attack-dog work is intended to - intimidate - demoralize - emasculate - subjugate the opposite camp. 8. Definition IDES != FUD IDES = intimidate demoralize emasculate subjugate -Yib _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
